Making US Unemployment Maps

If you don’t know already from some of my VizWorld posts, I’m a Flowing Data fangirl. Nathan Yau is the younger, hipper, nerdier Edward Tufte, and one who likes to share his sources and techniques. Understandably, Tufte has his trade secrets, but it was like pulling teeth to get him to share what tools and design methods he uses to make his graphics. Something about Adobe Illustrator and a cadre of assistants is all I got.

These are the results, admittedly without a legend (bad Maitri!), which I will work on in Photoshop. So you know what you’re looking at here, the lightest color is 0% unemployment and steps up from there in 2% increments, with the darkest color denoting 10+% unemployment. This data was downloaded from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

1. The Flowing Data original reproduced:

2. Diverging colors (blue=low; red=high)

3. Sequential colors (white=low; orange=high; black=+10%). The darker the hues, the more trouble folks have telling them apart. Black shows the worst hit spots and provides a backdrop with which to differentiate between the other colors

Check out the original Unemployment, 2004 To Present to see how bad things have become just in the last two years. This isn’t news, but just as well when you look at it in a county-by-county color graphic. The nation is indeed bleeding. Let’s make more casinos at home and start more land wars in Asia!

Like this:

Related

The only problem with using counties as the unit of analysis is that sparser the county, the larger it is. And larger blocks of color give an impression that a larger portion of the country is unemployed when in fact the opposite may be true (I’m sure the unemployment rate is high but you get the point, right?)

Patrix, I was thinking about how to further normalize this data. For now, I like the breakdown – that this map gives folks (and local chambers of commerce) an idea how their county’s unemployment number compares with others, and not a whole state’s data lumped together.